I really have to feel sorry for the people who run Tan-Y-Bryn, self-contained accommodation in Hobart, Tasmania. I booked this place for the second half of January next year because it looked so well-priced for such a great place to stay while we're at LCA as well, as the week we'll just hang around Hobart afterwards.

Unfortunately for both of us, it seems they forgot to note somewhere on some booking site that they were full for that period, and they got a booking through some high-handed booking organisation who said they were liable for AUD$1000 if they refused it. So they cancelled on me, as the easier & cheaper option. A step that wasn't taken lightly, to read the agonised e-mail they wrote me in the small hours of the next morning.

Since leaving Catalyst to follow my interests there seem to be a neverending number of organisations e-mailing to my old e-mail address, which I have to go through to update to a new e-mail address. This evening it was Air New Zealand's turn.

Going through their update form, I noticed a few other little details were wrong, and they had a couple of my pet hates down pat:

• My surname was spelled 'Mcmillan' rather than 'McMillan'
• My city was down as 'Wellington' rather than 'Porirua'

For no particularly good reason that I can see, they don't provide me with the ability to edit my surname. I have to ring some 0800 number, and I was kind of all 0800ed out having had to ring TelstraClear earlier. (To question their sense in wanting to deliver a password for an e-mail account to that same e-mail account... but that's another story...)

I can at least correct the city, though, right?

A GPS is one of those toys that I have wanted for a very long time. So last year I finally marshalled enough excuses in one place, lined them up and plunked down some money for a Garmin GPSmap 60CSx in the vague belief that there's enough Linux software out there which understands GPS, and the Garmin is a brand that seems to have mature Linux support. And besides, I'd been told it was a good model that would do what I wanted and then some.

Once I got it I naturally wanted to do stuff with it, and in particular I wanted to connect it up to my laptop which (of course) is running Linux and I found that it wasn't nearly as trivial as I had thought.

This prompted me to run around finding software to use with it, so here's my capsule review of my journey from "extremely naive" to "very naive". Perhaps I'll also learn something from the comments of people who are further down the track.

My first resort was "apt-cache search gps", of course, which immediately brings up such fine sounding programs as "gpsman", described as "A GPS manager" (I haven't managed to get it to do anything yet), "gpstrans" which since it specifically mentions Garmin GPS sounded like just the ticket (it appears to be quite old and superseded). There was some useful stuff as well.

Getting Maps on the GPS

Since the Garmin GPSMap series will display maps, I wanted to be able to get some mapping data on there. There are two map sources I was interested in:

• Map data from NZ Open GPS Maps which gives comprehensive coverage of New Zealand, and is free and community maintained, albeit with some annoying uncertainties about the licensing of the data, and it's being tied to Garmin GPSs.
• Map data from OpenStreetMap.org which gives excellent coverage of many areas of the world, and is free for use under a creative commons license.

Using the NZ Open GPS Maps

The NZ Open GPS Maps are built specifically for the Garmin GPS, so getting them onto my GPS was relatively simple once I found out the exact command line was remarkably hard.

The program that I needed to find to be able to get the maps onto my GPS was sendmap20 which is a free (as in beer) download from the cGPSMapper Website.

I downloaded the maps from the NZ Open GPS Maps hosted on the cGPSMapper site. I needed the files identified as 'binary' files - the installer is a Windows program and no use on Linux. They all have filenames like 64000012.img.

The command-line I first used to install the maps onto the GPS was:

sendmap20 -t/dev/ttyUSB0 640000??.img


That works fine, but if you have even a moderately sized micro SD card in the GPS there are much faster ways. As I found more free maps I found much better ways to do it.

An alternative approach

In the GPS (well, in my one anyway) there is a micro-SD card which is FAT formatted and all of the installed maps are in one humungous combined image of all of the uploaded maps. This means that there is no way to straightforwardly add/remove maps without creating that image, and re-uploading the whole thing. The image file is called 'gmapsupp.img' and is in the 'garmin' subdirectory on the SD card.

This means that you can create the file (or even several different files, with different maps on them) and move them directly on there much quicker, either by taking the SD card out and using it in a USB2 reader (for really big files) or switching the GPS to operate in USB Storage mode (which is USB1, but OK for smaller files).

You can create the IMG file to copy in as gmapsupp.img with sendmap20 also, with a command-line like:

sendmap20 -lNZOpenGPSMaps.img 640000??.img

and then, if you mount the GPS as /media/GPS, you can copy that file on directly

cp NZOpenGPSMaps.img /media/GPS/garmin/gmapsupp.img


QLandKarte

Another program I found useful specifically for dealing with the Garmin GPS Map format is QLandKarte, which understands the native Garmin format and will display the maps in a graphical window.

You can also point and click to select maps, building up a specific set that you can then upload to the device from within QLandKarte itself. This seems to operate a lot faster than sendmap20, presumably because it's driving the USB directly, rather than through usb_serial. To get it to work I seem to have to (a) sudo rmmod garmin_gps and (b) sudo QLandKarte, however, which is definitely not ideal.

For the moment I will continue to use sendmap20 to create files which are sets of the maps I want, and will put them on the device in USB storage mode.

QLandKarte is still very useful, however, for looking at maps and deciding if they are worth bothering with. I used it in this way to select the Australian maps I took with me when I went to Linux.Conf.AU recently. There are more free Garmin GPS maps.

OpenStreetMap.org

Those Australian maps came from OpenStreetMap.org and ultimately I expect that it will become the best source of data for creating maps for my GPS. OpenStreetMap.org is an attempt to provide community-maintained maps for the whole world and which seems to have made significant progress in UK, Europe, America and Australia as well as many other parts of the world.

The data from OpenStreetMap.org does not have the same licensing restrictions as are present even in the NZ Open GPS Maps data (which is relatively free, but has problems similar to the old-style BSD license).

There are also some good mapping interfaces to the OpenStreetMap data although the searching currently still leaves something to be desired. Interfaces are also available for extracting subsets of the data, which is in a fairly straightforward XML format, or you can download the whole lot, but at nearly 3GB for the bzip2 compressed version you won't do it every day.

I gave a brief overview talk about OpenStreetMap.org while I was at Linux.Conf.AU and it seemed to go down quite well (I gave it several times, in fact). You don't need a GPS to contribute to the project, and of course the maps which are being created are usable for many purposes beyond their usefulness on GPS. Some people apparently even print them out, but that just seems weird!

LCA officially started today, with a great opening keynote by Bruce Schneier very nicely pointing out the differences between feeling secure and being secure, and with a few good examples of where these are mismatched and action needs to be taken to fix the mismatch. Good stuff - catch it on video if you get the chance.

Of course for me LCA started on Monday when I got roped into presenting a lightning talk at the Community Wireless miniconf on OpenStreetMap.org which is something I've been fiddling with recently, and a project which definitely deserves more attention. Since nobody else turned up to give their lightning talks my 3 minute presentation was stretched severely out of shape, but the Community Wireless miniconf was generally pretty interesting and I stayed there all day in the end.

Yesterday was the SysAdmin miniconf, and as one of the organisers there was no chance for me to look around at what else was going on. It was a full-on day, and the feedback I have from everyone is that it was a good miniconf. Certainly it was good enough to attract more people than could fit in the 120 seat theatre we initially had allocated so that we had to move into a much larger theatre. A big thank-you to the organisers for so quickly recognising and reshuffling things so that was possible.

All signs so far definitely indicate another great linux.conf.au

I'm at DebConf7 now, in Edinburgh, and it is great to catch up with the great bunch of geeks that is the Debian community once more. As well as working on general stuff through DebCamp (the week leading up to DebConf proper) I'm helping out in producing the video streams running the sound desk or one of the cameras. The streams are highly recommended, and you can find them on http://streams.video.debconf.org:8000/, though for the New Zealanders reading this they do, of course, happen at seriously silly times of the day. Here is the DebConf7 schedule if you want to watch :-(. We'll get the talks up in a downloadable format as soon as we can, and I'll point people at them again then.

Highlights of the conference so far have been a talk by Nick Mailer on Debian Day, which was a very nicely presented run-down on the ancient history of intellectual property laws here in the UK, and the very interactive session this evening on Maintaining Packages with Git, which had some very good tips from David Nusinow as well as a lot of support from the audience. I now better understand why Penny is so keen on "git rebase", though hopefully I would have figured that out if I worked on more shared projects.

It's great to see 150-odd people in the room, many of whom had some experience with Git, and there were some very heavy users with great insight into it's strengths and weaknesses. Contrast that with DebCon5 in Helsinki where I almost felt Martin Langhoff and I were unheard when we acclaimed it, or even at LCA in 2006, where Martin did a first pass at importing X.Org into Git. Of course Git itself has come a long way from then too.

Another very interesting session was Martin Krafft talking about 'netconf', which is his proposal for a replacement of the ifupdown infrastructure using a much more stateless, event driven approach. This definitely looks like a well considered design and I hope he can pull it off.

I've got my own talk on Thursday, so I'll be concentrating on pulling that together for the next few days. If as many people come as have said they will (50% of the people signed up for any talk at that time) then it will be a very stuffy BoF room. The venue here in Edinburgh is great, and it's nice to have a good network connection. Everything has been running very smoothly for the participants, as far as I can see, though I know plenty of people have been working very hard to make it so, behind the scenes.

Weirdly, after only a short time using IPv6 at home and at work, I am finding I miss not having it readily available IPv6. I unfortunately had to disable my tunnels because adding 350mS latency to everything makes the web very frustrating. Perhaps next year we'll be able to add IPv6 to the desired network features for DebConf8 in Mar del Plata. Good to see that in the meantime the availability of the new IPv6 nameservers for .nz has been announced in my absence though.

I followed the advice of the lazywebs a while ago and bought myself a phone (Nokia 6100) on the local auction website then went around to the local Vodafone dealer and bought a SIM card for it.

When I signed up I ticked the box saying "Enable Global Roaming" and now that I'm travelling I realise I should have actually confirmed that happened before I left the country, because it didn't happen. Now I'm sitting in Melbourne with only the (free :-) Wifi to keep me company.

So looking at the Vodafone site, it appears that I could dial "777" to enable global roaming. Apparently I should have done that a few days ago, because it sure won't work now. Perhaps this "Manage Your Account" thingy will work? A period of perusing pages of FAQs follows, and I eventually conclude that it would work.

Except that when I try and register for the service I am told that my phone number is not valid. Yes, I moved my old number across to Vodafone, about the same time Brenda was lamenting the inadequate preparation Vodafone did for Mobile Number Portability, and while the actual phone has been working, Brenda did note back on April 1st that "you can't use the website to manage your account". Two months on and it still isn't possible, which is pretty poor really - you would think Vodafone would be actively encouraging people to move across to their network.

So I'm effectively phoneless until I get to Edinburgh and can buy a SIM card.

At least I can still get on IRC and ask someone to call Heather and tell her why I'm not phoning.

Flying home from Auckland the other day I discovered that women don't have noses. At least that was the case for the little representations on the safety sheet in the seat pocket in front of me. Wherever there was a little picture of a man, it would be a person with a nose. Where it was a picture of a woman there would be no nose.

Odd, and yet somehow it worked.

I shall now have to spend some time staring more closely at people's faces, so if you see me looking at you strangely over the next few days please don't get upset: I'm just trying to work out whether you have a big nose, and why a picture of a person without a nose should look more like a woman.

Last week I was flying down from Auckland to Wellington and when I checked in the lady at the counter said "I believe they are going to announce a delay on that flight due to the late arrival of the incoming aircraft".

Sure enough, 5 minutes later we were told our flight would be delayed "about 20 minutes".

I'm pretty suspicious about airline delay announcements. I don't know what school of optimism or psychology they send those people on, but it seems like they never want to tell us when the flight really is delayed until.

So I cranked up my laptop and connected to a free WLAN (curiously called "Mahara", but it was open enough for my VPN to start without me having to visit a web page or anything - nice). I browsed to the airline arrivals page and discovered that the plane we were due to travel on was due to arrive 45 minutes late.

Sure enough, 20 minutes later we were informed that the plane would be 45 minutes late, and it was.

Why do airlines do this? Is there some psychological study somewhere that says that you should break this bad news 20 minutes at a time, because I sure think I would rather just know the whole lot up front. Do they somehow think that the collective belief of the passengers will cause the incoming jet to be 50% more efficient, and be able to fly the 1 hour route in only 40 minutes?

Fortunately nowadays we can use information sources on the internet to work out the truth before it is announced. I know that when I was flying to Sydney for LCA I flummoxed one of the attendants by telling her when the flight would actually be departing only a few minutes before she announced it to everyone.

I guess it gives me something to do while I wait...

Here at LCA it seems that some people want shared calendars, so I'm pleaased to be able to tell people that I have spent the last 9 months thinking about and writing a CalDAV server.

While it isn't finished yet (is software ever finished?), it does work just fine with all of the free CalDAV clients that are available, and a number of nice people have translated it into six languages so far.

So if you are at LCA and want to know more catch me at tonight's penguin dinner.

Puck has pinched the laptop I normally use for conferences so yesterday I had to lug my mammoth laptop around all day just so I could deliver my presentation from it. In the event the projector didn't work for me so I had to borrow Holger's instead. So I am now laboriously typing this all out on my Nokia 770...

Yesterday the conference started and I mainly followed the Debian stream, which is where my own short talk was. Keith Packard gave a fun overview of where X development is going and also showed some of the fancy stuff in action, including seamlessly expanding the desktop when he plugged in the projector. I'm certainly looking forward to that, and I hope I can get to meet Dave Airlie while I'm here and find out whether the open ATI drivers will be keeping up with that as well.

This morning Chris Blizzard gave a keynote talk about the one laptop per child project, and he's up now talking about Fedora, which I know far too little about, so it is quite interesting.

We had some fun yesterday afternoon when my son ran up and told me “Daddy there is a grownup over there using a kids computer!” prompting a flash crowd around the guys from Oregon State University who had an actual OLPC laptop and it was great to see it in action. That sunlight readable screen is awesome, and I really want to see one on my callphone, and my internet tablet, and (of course) my laptop. It would also be nice to see that mesh networking more readily available.

This morning I first heard about the Sidux distribution too, which I will definitely be looking into further.

No links on this post at the moment because it's kind of hard to do that stuff right without having a real keyboard and mouse attached. Feel free to add some in some comments, and I'll come back and add some more links later too.

Well the incoming plane managed to land and we checked in and await departure ...

Whew!

So we should get to Sydney late afternoon :-)

I am sitting in foggy Wellington Airport, using the new free wifi, which is a blessing because the plane cannot leave due to it's not being here in the first place.

I was informed of this by a text message at 1:14am this morning - or at least informed that the plane would be delayed by an hour (now long past) - unfortunately too late to really react. Currently they are suggesting the delay will be three hours, on the assumption that a plane will be able to land at 8:00am. The fog outside is still thick though and it's now 7:15 with no sign of the sun.

Oh well, Sydney by lunchtime I expect, and at least we have convivial company with a few other Catalyst people who are also off to LCA before the main bunch leave tomorrow.

<rant>

I know: I'm a broken record, but there seems to be a depth of stupidity to the Pizza UI which just makes it such an easy target...

Consider this "funny once" joke. When I try and enter my credit card details these guys have programmed their Pizza interface somewhat better than these losers. Some standard UI metaphors work: for example when I go to Hell, I can at least tab correctly from one field to the next. Still though, when I arrive at a field which is a drop-down box, they clearly have so much control over the "user experience" that stuff like hitting the down arrow to select from a drop-down has to be handled personally, and the programmer appears to have forgotten to implement that sort of behaviour.

There are worse sins than the ones visited on people arriving at Hell. In fact the UI from Hell regularly receives awards - presumably from people who find it "novel". The judges probably don't actually buy Pizza over teh intarwebs so they haven't seen it before. Or perhaps they like black, because it's all cool and designery, or they are poorband users who normally have to access their pizza through the 0800 interface. Hopefully those people will eventually be replaced by people who have used the site and got over it. People who actually want to order Pizza, and just want a page where they can quickly and easily do so, and who are sick of chucking devils in the corner just so they can click on a button.

Using this UI to present a plain 'website' is surely just the worst ever though. I regularly find music artists with this kind of site too, which for me means "nothing to see here: move along". And I do, of course, since it is clearly going to be a learning curve understanding their designer's idea of a "user interface" before I can find the information I'm after. After a long succession of bad experiences along these lines, finding out more about the actual music from the Amazon website than from the artist's one, I've pretty much given up on them. In fact nowadays I just go straight to Wikipedia, which has an increasingly comprehensive collection of information about music and musicians.

I haven't seen a really serious website, that wants people to buy stuff, which has been written using the Pizza UI, in fact. I'd wonder why that is, except that it is basically obvious to anyone who regularly buys stuff on the internet (or anywhere, in fact) that increasing the barriers to your customers is not good business sense. Experienced programmers will also understand that the Pizza UI cannot be used unless the server interaction is sufficiently simple, and the presentation is the driving motive.

The fact that Google now use this technology in that one simple way is really interesting. One wonders if it stems from the fact that through an accident of historical bias against Linux by Microsoft and Apple, Google were left with this as their only choice for a platform-independent way of delivering video to the world, and particularly to the sometimes vocal and influential thought leaders in the FOSS community. Or is it a more insidious plot, to ensure that Google, which is primarily in the advertising business of course, wants us all to be able to watch next years advertising, and this is a way of ensuring that we all have an appropriate advertising presentation layer installed!

I don't think that the people over at Google HQ are quite that machiavellian yet, however, and I expect the explanation really is somewhere between "we saw someone else do it and it was clearly a good idea" and "that was all that would work on the three main operating systems".

</rant>

Well hopefully that's got all of the vitriol out of me, and now I can be all relaxed and friendly for the coming week at linux.conf.au 2007. I certainly don't want to offend all the other open source geeks flocking to the best linux conference, as Google puts it.

This week I had to visit Queenstown to do some work for a client. Queenstown is surrounded by beautiful landscape, and I had great weather for the flight from Christchurch to Queenstown, including being able to very clearly see Mt Cook, Lake Hawea, Wanaka, Mt Aspiring, and the Crown Range from my window seat. So it was extremely frustrating that my camera batteries only lasted until Christchurch.

When I got to Queenstown I realised that I had also forgotten my sunglasses, but I didn't need them for long as I was soon back to wrangling the computer programs into the right shape. All was "mostly working" at the end of the first day, which was the kind of progress I had hoped for so I celebrated with a very nice dinner at Tatler which was bizarrely nearly deserted. Such a restaurant in Wellington would have been packed any night of the week, I feel sure. I wandered around Queenstown after dinner wondering how they manage to retain that small central core for something which is so incredibly touristy. Touristy without being tacky. Well, not too tacky anyway. It's quite impressive that they have managed to hide away all the industrial areas somewhere that I didn't see.

The next two days the weather was increasingly wet with two very nice breakfasts at Joe's Garage to start each day off. I didn't mind the weather too much as I was inside working ... until the time came to leave on Friday. After a couple of hours wait my first flight was cancelled and I was bumped to a later flight, which was also cancelled so I got moved to one on Saturday afternoon. I've had to cope with travel disruption so infrequently that I was really quite flummoxed for a wee while. I called up one of the people I had been working with, and he was kind enough to invite me for dinner while I figured out what to do (thanks Craig - it was much appreciated).

The next morning dawned. Wet. Again. And I really didn't trust that 1:00pm flight to actually get out. The forecast was for Queenstown to partly clear, and then close in again, but I get the impression that this airport is closed a lot more than most, and from the flight path in I'm not altogether surprised - although it felt like we could touch some of those peaks, I think I would rather not do so, thank you very much, and I'm sure the pilots feel the same way.

So I hired a rental and drove to Christchurch, rebooking my flight en route. Unfortunately I took a wrong turn at Cromwell, I think, and it took a lot longer than it should have (via Dunedin) so I got to Christchurch just barely before my flight left, very flustered.

A long day, but at least I get to sleep in my own bed at the end of it :-)

I'm currently at the Sydney Moodle Conference, which has (of course) been a great event. Everyone who knows me knows how much I enjoy going to these open source conferences such as the various Moodle "Moots", Debconf and the Linux.conf.au annual Australian Linux conference. I think that the people at these conferences must crave these occasional face to face meetings with all of the people they interact with on-line.

All credit to Julian Ridden and the Monte St Angelo College here in North Sydney for making it so enjoyable. The college is a very nice and photogenic old school within the commercial part of North Sydney and one of the highlights for me has been today's keynote by Diane Brook (who is the ICT head of department at Monte St Angelo) about Teaching the Net Generation. Hearing her talk of the challenges of keeping up with today's school children really brought back to me my personal experience of finding something missing from Wikipedia, adding it, and seeing it turn into a whole fleshed out article over the next few months.

Last night's dinner (sponsored by Catalyst IT of course :-) was a lot of fun, but it's amazing how no matter how many wonderful people I manage to talk to there are still many more who I have not yet met, and I probably won't get to, since the conference ends in a couple more hours, and I'm here writing this blog about it.

So I think I'll leave it at that, and run off and find some more people to chat with!